Leading Against Change

One of the advantages of reading from every section of the bookstore is seeing the connections between seemingly disparate genres and viewpoints. Case in point: While reading Kotter’s classic Leading Change for its business content, what struck me and stuck with me is its relevance for mitigating against climate change.

Kotter’s book, originally published in the breathlessly fast-paced 1980s (yes, that does seem like a quaint perspective now), outlines an eight-stage process for successful change movements within business organizations seeking to adapt to changing business circumstances. 70% of change movements fail, he writes, because the people leading them don’t understand the basic dynamics of successful organization change–to wit:

He’s quite emphatic on the importance of following the steps in order, and describes what happened to change movements that tried to do things out of step (summary: it got ugly, and people lost their jobs). But just to put a pin in his eye, or maybe to avoid putting the conclusion into the middle of the blog post, I’m going to discuss how each of these have been applied to the global climate change movement so far, in reverse:

Step 8. Incorporating changes into the culture

Tumbleweeds. Have you seen any changes incorporated into the culture? Maybe a $0.05 fee for plastic bags, and widespread support for compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Over 30 years of activism. Pardon me while I catch my breath from considering the dramatic scope of our collective, cultural response. We’ve collectively shown more initiative in adapting to changes in cable television subscription options than we have in adapting to the greatest environmental crisis of all time.

Step 7. Never letting up

Absolutely true of the die-hard climate activists. Society as a whole and our politicians in particular let up whenever a manufacturing plant closes down or there’s a cold snap in Arkansas.

Step 6. Generating short term wins

Indeed, on a global level, we seem to take a particular glee in dismantling any short-term wins we actually manage to achieve. Kyoto! is dead. The UN climate negotiating process! died, for all intents and purposes, in 2009 at Copenhagen. Carbon tax! is a political opportunity to exploit the ruling party at the expense of the climate, and will be dismantled with all possible speed. You get the idea. If you’ve got a short-term climate win from North America that hasn’t died due to political expediency, or isn’t yet on the chopping block, please share it.

There are small-scale short-term wins on a local level. But globally? Not so much. Even national short-term wins are hard to find, and easily swamped by the Short Term Not Even Thinking About Global Warmings (see: China and India–though China, bless its despotic heart, is coming around).

Step 5. Empowering broad-based action

If the broad-based action you are attempting to empower is consumerism, congratulations! There are now thousands of products on store shelves with green labels, promising to reduce pollution and waste and species loss. But when Kotter writes about empowering broad-based action, he’s talking about making sure that all employees right down to the front line have the tools and authority they need to align all of their work tasks with the new corporate vision. Not just giving them a new colour of rubbish bin and a pin that says “I recycle!”

Instead of empowering citizens to engage in broad-based action to mitigate climate change, we collectively pat them on the head, tell them not to worry about it too much, go shopping–and maybe pick up some recycled toilet paper while you’re at the mall.

Step 4. Communicating the Vision for Buy-In

If you’re asking “What Vision?” you are asking the right question.

Step 3. Developing a Change Vision

See above.

You absolutely can go to any mid-sized bookstore and find a few books outlining the author’s change vision; some of them will even be coherent and well-thought out. You can visit any number of green blogs and websites for the same. Lots of visions. Too many visions. So many visions that there isn’t any real Change Vision on a societal level, certainly not here in North America. In fact, what we have are conflicting visions: “Stop burning all fossil fuels now!” vs. “Implement carbon capture technologies now!” vs. “Return to a pre-industrial technology level!” vs. “A high-tech-low-carbon future for all!” ad infinitum. Competing Change Visions on the part of the Good Guys, splitting public attention and commitment, vs. one over-reaching enormous Static Vision from the oil lobby: “climate change action will destroy the economy and there’s no such thing as climate change anyway, so unless you want purposeless poverty, DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.” Guess who’s winning?

Some countries in Europe actually seem to have guiding coalitions that are effectively navigating their countries towards actual change. Good for them. Here in North America, all our politicians live in fear of the Tea Party–whether they’re in the US or not.

Step 1. Create a sense of urgency

Are you feeling urgency on climate change? On a daily basis? Weekly? Monthly? Or when there is a hot spell in Sudbury? Do we have a collective, cultural sense of urgency for dealing with climate change?

In other words, they’re determined to skip to Steps 3 and 4, and sell people on a new future without having created any sense of why the old future isn’t going to be so hot. (Actually, it’s going to be very hot–too hot. Pardon the pun.) As a result, our newspapers, governments, and the regular Guy on the Street holding his cup of Tim Horton’s coffee persist in engaging in a completely futile and utterly pointless comparison of The Future the Greenies Are Trying to Coerce Me Into and The Future I Was Promised by the Jetson Family in Grade 2, complete with jet-packs and robot maids and jobs for everyone in a stable climate with cities that aren’t underwater and agricultural regions that aren’t permanently drought-stricken, which is actually at this point impossible, since we have already dumped enough carbon in the atmosphere to prevent ice ages for the next 130,000 years.

That’s not for lack of trying on everyone’s part. 350, for instance, is trying very hard to build a larger movement and raise a collective sense or urgency to drive political and corporate will towards this problem. They’ve had a number of successes, but it’s far from being front-page material across the continent. James Hansen has been single-handedly trying to ratchet up urgency on global warming–and facing a lot of hostility for doing so. But in general, those who do try to ratchet up urgency over climate change lose the attention battle to the Kardashian family on a regular basis, and after a decade or two of trying some of them reasonably conclude that the problem must be that urgency is the wrong route, let’s compete directly with the Kardashians by engaging short-term attention via celebrity endorsements and branding exercises.

No can do. Yes, raising urgency is a long-term project that requires patience and repetition, and yes, it’s a long slow painful haul that possibly ends in the rocky bottom of a steep cliff. Granted. But according to Kotter, urgency is the needed first step of the only game in town, and until we figure it out, we’re going nowhere.

Oddly enough, after drafting this post, I came across Kotter’s book on creating urgency while browsing in the library. I’m looking forward to seeing if it has any more climate change insights for me.

It’s my untested belief that expertise in any technical field will result in a near-total loss of respect for journalism.

I know it did for me. The more I learned about climate change, the biodiversity crisis, environmental regulations, and renewable energy, the more I realized that newspaper articles reflected reality only by chance, in passing. More often, an ill-equipped person with good writing skills and no critical thinking ability would write a piece far outside of their education and background by interviewing a bunch of people who claimed to be experts, without evaluating their credentials. We get climate change pieces giving equal weight to well-respected international climate experts and oil-funded PR hacks, pieces on renewable energy with well-reasoned arguments by scientists quoting the best available information and fruit-loop arguments by naturopaths who wouldn’t recognize a herz if it came up and hit them on the head.

And you end up with a voting public almost completely muddled on key issues because they’ve come to the completely totally 100% incontrovertibly WRONG conclusion that there are two sides.

Of course people are entitled to their opinions. I am legally well within my rights to believe that Mars is peopled by winged skeletons who worship Lily Allen. But the legal right to hold an opinion is not the same, and can’t be the same, as the attitude that reality is then required to bend to accommodate that opinion. No matter what I believe, Mars is in fact NOT peopled by winged skeletons who worship Lily Allen, or by anything at all. The experts are right and I am just plain wrong. (Or I would be, if I held that opinion.)

This set of science experiments sheds some light on the psychology of our inherent tendency to give equal weight to two contrary opinions, even when one comes from an expert and the other does not. Fortunately, for those of you who have no intention of purchasing the article for the low-low price of $10, you can also read this fun summation in the Washington Post.

This went on for 256 intervals, so the two individuals got to know each other quite well — and to know one another’s accuracy and skill quite well. Thus, if one member of the group was better than the other, both would pretty clearly notice. And a rational decision, you might think, would be for the less accurate group member to begin to favor the views of the more accurate one — and for the accurate one to favor his or her own assessments.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, report the study authors, “the worse members of each dyad underweighted their partner’s opinion (i.e., assigned less weight to their partner’s opinion than recommended by the optimal model), whereas the better members of each dyad overweighted their partner’s opinion.” Or to put it more bluntly, individuals tended to act “as if they were as good or as bad as their partner” — even when they quite obviously weren’t.

The researchers tried several variations on the experiment, and this “equality bias” didn’t go away. In one case, a “running score” reminded both members of the pair who was faring better (and who worse) at identifying the target — just in case it wasn’t obvious enough already. In another case, the task became much more difficult for one group member than the other, leading to a bigger gap in scores — accentuating differences in performance. And finally, in a third variant, actual money was offered for getting it right.

None of this did away with the “equality bias.”

The research psychologists attribute this to our need to belong to groups and get along with people. It seems that need outweighs any practical consideration, a good deal of the time, including when money is on the line. Fascinating, right? People who are right and know they’re right defer to people they know are wrong in order to get along and maintain group dynamics, even when it costs them to do so.

When it comes to climate change, this is a serious problem.

Aside: Climate change is a real thing that is really happening and is a complete and total catastrophe. There is no debate on this point in any credible scientific circle. If you think that there is, I’m so sorry, but you’ve been had.

/aside

We end up not moving forward with policy solutions because we keep acting like the actual experts and the paid non-expert hacks share some kind of equivalence when they patently don’t.

But–and I’m sure I’m not the only person thinking this–it’s present in every community, including the SBC.

Ah! See? I told you I’d come around to it.

People act as if the opinions and contributions of experts and amateurs are equivalent when they are not.

Thankfully, the fates of human civilization and a minimum of 30% of animal and plant species do not rest on this fact. The worst that happens in most cases is that a person walks around for a good long time in a garment that looks like utter shit and feels really fabulous about it. On a scale of worldwide catastrophe, it doesn’t even rank.

On the other hand, as this science makes pretty clear, an entire generation of sewers are being educated largely by internet celebrities who are too incompetent even to understand how incompetent they are. It’s not a catastrophe, no, but it is a crying shame. And as predicted by the social psychologists, if anyone ever speaks up to point out that some of them are experts and other are, well … not …, they are pilloried as Mean Girls, jelluz haterz, and bullies.

Aside 2: Yep, I count myself in the group of people sometimes wandering happily about in a garment that on later reflection was not up to snuff. It happens. We’re all human. I won’t melt if someone points it out, though tact is always preferred. It doesn’t count as “bravery” to “put yourself out there” if you feel entitled to nothing but praise; and if you’re going to present your work in public you need to be prepared for public criticism.

/aside

So it’s not the end of the world, no, but it’s a detriment to all of us. The people getting the money, in many cases, haven’t earned it; the people with valuable skills to share don’t have the platform to do so; we keep acting as if everyone’s equal when they’re not to be Nice and keep everyone happy, even though not everyone is happy; there are entire boiling lava rivers of resentment and bitterness flowing right under all the green meadows we’re so happily skipping over (in our badly-pressed culottes and boxy tops with peter pan collars, no less). It’s weird. Can’t we, as an online culture, agree that it’s not a violation of the Geneva Convention if someone points out that a hem is crooked or a print isn’t matched? Does it matter if it’s not “nice”? Don’t we all benefit from increased honesty and openness? Do any of us actually expect to be perfect, or need to be treated as if we are perfect in order to function day to day? If you really don’t want people to point out how you fucked up, is it so much to ask that you acknowledge it yourself, then? Hey look at this horrible side seam–I really fucked up!

That went off on a bit of a tangent. Pardon me. Let’s drag it back on track:

The Equality Bias! It makes everything worse while we smile and pretend nothing’s wrong. Fight it!

Naomi’s political lens is so focused that it’s blinding. This is less a book about climate change than it is about why climate change is now the perfect excuse to do everything she’s always wanted to do anyway (eg. scrap globalization, redistribute wealth), which is fine, but she ignores any contrary evidence. For example, she has a brief section on the brief flourishing and untimely death of Ontario’s green energy economy, which she blames 100% on the WTO’s decision on domestic content. The waffling and delays of government regulators on applications, the constant changes in direction, and the dead-set-contrarian politics of the mostly rural ridings where wind energy projects were to be sited were completely overlooked, but as anyone who actually went through the process can tell you, the domestic content reg change was the least of any developer’s worries, and came after years and years of frustrations brought about by the public sector.

She spends a great deal of time criticizing anyone else whose political perspectives change how they perceive climate science and solutions, but is much, much worse herself in this book. No information penetrates unless it conforms with her pre-existing beliefs. But the global carbon cycle is not sentient. It doesn’t care how carbon emissions are reduced; it doesn’t even care if they are reduced at all. It does not vote and has no political preferences. WE do; and so it’s up to us to make some decisions about if and how we’re going to turn things around. It should be a mark of deep shame to any thinking citizen in a democratic society that authoritarian China is pulling so far ahead in the transition to a renewable economy.

The flaws with This Changes Everything can be boiled down to two, major, fundamental issues:

1. She acts as if the private and public spheres were diametric and opposed, rather than almost entirely overlapping. A person who works all day in a corporation then goes home and becomes a voter and consumer. People move back and forth between the private and public sector in terms of employment all the time. We are not talking about two different species–the private, evil homo sapiens determined to ruin the earth at a profit and the loving, public homo sapiens trying desperately to save it. It’s all just people.

2. The public sphere is as complicit in this as the private sphere. The reason we do not have a healthy, thriving renewable energy sector in Ontario right now is because the people of Ontario didn’t want it. They had it, and then put the politicians of the province under so much pressure to gut it that eventually they did to save their mandate. The moratorium on offshore wind projects in Ontario is a perfect example: two (small) corporations were all set to do the assessment work necessary to figure out if their Lake Ontario projects would work or not, but the government made offshore projects in Ontario illegal because the voters in Scarborough demanded it.

This is a terrible book on climate change. You’d be better off reading almost anything else on the subject.